Handling Huge Multidimensional Arrays in C++

Question

I\'m designing a game in C++ similar to Minecraft that holds an enormous amount of terrain data in memory. In general, I want to store an array in memory that is [5][4][5][50][

Answer 1

If you want to allocate something on the heap, use new.

#include 

class Parent
{
    std::auto_ptr child; // use auto_ptr for dynamically-allocated members
    Parent(const Parent&); // You probably don't want to copy this giant thing
public:
    Parent();
};

Parent::Parent()
  : child(new Child) // initialize members with an initializer list
{
}

Also, avoid mixing C and C++ styles. There's no reason to do

typedef struct blah{ ... } BLAH;

in C++. A struct is just a class with all of the members public by default; just like a class, you can refer to the struct type's name without using the struct tag. There's also no need to specify void for a function that takes no parameters.

boost::multi_array (linked in PigBen's answer) is a good choice over raw arrays.